After reading Adam Scheinberg's original article "The Paradox of Choice" and Kevin Russo's response, I want to add my personal comments to this discussion. I will quote Adam and Russo several times and pick up their arguments.

I opinion is that if you're going make an application, website, or anything else for public consumption, don't waste my time by creating more 'me too' crap. If you're going to make something, then make it better or at least different from everybody else.

I imagine that most of the programers of those 25 FTP programs "90% of which are pretty much the same" did think they were making it better or different from what was out there.

Maybe they couldn't find an FTP program for free at all. Maybe their version is faster, easier, or more secure than the ones they did find. (Or maybe they just thought it was.) Maybe they wanted one written in Java so it would run on any platform or maybe they were just learning a new language. All of these things seem like acceptable reasons to write your own FTP application if you have the skill to do so.

The point is why do you want to prevent someone from writing a program just because there are similar ones out there. If too much choice is confusing to you then only download and use the highest rated one on some website. Or ask a friend who uses FTP a lot. Or maybe try one for a while and then another, etc. until you find one that works the best for you. If they really are all that similar then it doesn't matter which one you use... just download one and use it.

So what if a version gets only 0.2% market share. According to the Computer Industry Almanac, there are almost 1 billion users online. ( http://tinyurl.com/2732k ) So even such a small market share would mean that 200 million people benefitted from that particular FTP app. Besides, if one has .2% market share and one has 90%, guess which one hackers are going to target. If for some reason they target the tiny market share app the other 99.8% of us win.